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14 thoughts on Dude, Where Did You Take That Shot?

I’m sorry but it’s 8am on a Monday in India and it is time to rant. I HATE this. I know people are passionate about where they stand and so am I. If you stand on the opposite side of me that’s totally okay these are just my thoughts. If you are an INFLUENCER which means you do Collabs or have a lot of followers or even some followers I think it is kind of mean spirited to share photos with no location. I’ve talked about this before. People have the attitude that THEY THEMSELVES were the first humans to ever walk into that spot when that SIMPLY IS NOT TRUE. The photographer who is complaining about people and saying they won’t ever tag is SURPRISE: one of the damn people or tourists going to the spot too! It makes me angry when people try to pretend they are better than the masses! News flash! We ARE the masses! We aren’t anything special, us photographers! Just because we may take a better photo than an iPhone photographer doesn’t make us any more deserving to shoot a location. I hate how entitled photographers have become and I hate how they use ‘saving nature’ as the excuse. NO. If it was saving nature then YOU YOURSELF wouldn’t have gone. It is purely self serving. Power feels good. You found a spot and you don’t want to reveal it to others that is okay I get it but saying you are doing it to save the earth when YOU YOURSELF did the same thing just really rubs me the wrong way. Everyone has different thoughts. But I feel STRONGLY that it is good to be kind. You aren’t saving the earth by going yourself and not telling others. I think it’s being a little pretentious. You found out that location from the internet or someone else so why is it okay to demonize other people who simply want to do the same thing? I just don’t understand but we always vow to tag the location or as close to the location as possible because we were not the first ones to exist there and in the current social media platform people will ask questions and I don’t have time to respond to all of them sometimes and it’s the nice thing to do.

So we encourage people to get from behind their screens and enjoy outside. Just not to the incredible vistas where we photograph, post on IG, and then hope someone gets inspired by the beauty of it.
Those places are only for the elite, not the masses… Got it.

People are so worried about “protecting their shots “but if your composition and processing are that easy to replicate, then there’s really nothing special about the shot worth protecting.
I can sympathize with keeping locations secret for protecting the land from reckless assholes. I think it’s a legitimate a concern.
But otherwise photographers need to get over themselves.
Oh and btw unless the gps data has been removed from the metadata, it’s actually not that hard to figure out where shots have been taken. And if not, if you have even a vague general idea, Google Earth can get you there most of the time.

As an amateur who takes photos as a hobby, I always want to know where the scene is, so hopefully I can go there also. However . . . I can appreciate how professional landscape photographers put in a lot of time and effort to find someplace unique so they can get that “special” shot. I try to imagine how they must feel when others like me want to cash in on their hard work.

Why should you ? People can (and should) do their own research. That’s part of the job. And the end of the day, if you reveal the location and camera settings, people without a clue will be mad at you when their shot doesn’t come out right. Waste of time….

Besides the millions of people that can find no place to live, I can’t find better evidence for the fact that there are waaaay too many people on this planet. The selfishness of over breeding leaves no good answer to this arrogant mistake. This is pure greed.